Gonon: Building a Clock with No Numerals

10 pointsposted 4 days ago
by nullpath
(tonygaeta.com)

5 Comments

pkasting

an hour ago

Crowing over omitting Arabic numerals in the name of avoiding any kind of cultural influence or bias seems silly when everything is still going to be expressed in decimal.

volemo

an hour ago

I was also confused why the outer ring must only show zero or one, and then it struck me — twelve hour system.

ray__

28 minutes ago

The author wanted it to retain some practical value, hence the discussion of the four “layers” of time—departing from the 12-hour system completely, even if there is a better way to represent time outside of it, would make the clock difficult to use.

imsohotness

an hour ago

Very interesting. Only thing that I see is that it's difficult to tell a difference between an 8 and a 9. Like I could see how it was different on the physical clock as it changes, but if I were to just look at it on its own, it would be hard to tell without literally trying to count the sides. I'd probably just make up some symbol for those. but otherwise very cool!

tamimio

16 minutes ago

> The answer turned out to be geometry.

But that’s how Arabic numerals are made, it’s the count of the angles in each one.

Still, I like the concept of this watch.